Linux Now Has Its First Open Source RISC-V Processor | Hacker News Reader

Linux Now Has Its First Open Source RISC-V Processor

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86 pointsmkesper16 comments

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Maybe should have linked here directly: https://www.sifive.com/products/coreplex-risc-v-ip/u54-mc/

Which was discussed few days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15400217

Would be nice if there was a summary page describing what "open source processor" means in this context.

I understand the ISA is open source, but SiFive does appear to be selling their IP.

https://dev.sifive.com/coreplex-risc-v-ip/buy/

Royalty-free seems like a better term to describe what they are offering than "open source".

Indeed, tl;dr SiFive sells cpu hardware design IP starting from 275k.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15400217

> I understand the ISA is open source, but SiFive does appear to be selling their IP. > > https://dev.sifive.com/coreplex-risc-v-ip/buy/

IIUC, SiFive is selling the ready-made "hard IP" [1], that means a compiled netlist that has been laid out at a slightly-abstract-but-almost-mask level.

All this is manual work done on top of a netlist generated using the open-source Rocket chip generator [2,3] (SiFive people contribute to the upstream repository).

Let's make a Wordpress analogy: SiFive is a big contributor to Wordpress and does most of the work upstream. At the same time they sell you preconfigured server images for your blog with Wordpress, nginx, varnish and postfix almost ready to go (few settings like IP, hostname and WP theme are still missing).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_intellectual_pro...

[2] https://bar.eecs.berkeley.edu/projects/2014-rocket_chip.html

[3] https://github.com/freechipsproject/rocket-chip

Also they resell IP that is not theirs to give away, sadly. They are working on putting this chip in workstation class hardware, and when they do it will support PCIe, DDR4, USB3, etc. using off the shelf solutions they have licensed and integrated.

I hope that over time they, or partners, or others, will develop open source alternatives to these IP blocks. So that we can gradually increase the level of openness

Will this all be on a SOC? Are these plans public?

It'd be great to get some single board computers on the market based on this architecture...

https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/

Scroll down to "Freedom Unleashed".

Seems like a good start though. LowRISC(http://www.lowrisc.org/) is working on completely open processors, so if the adoption of RISC through SiFives' processors can improve support for RISC-V, the path towards open processor hardware should be a lot easier.

A better written article: https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332398

Maybe I'm missing the relevant nexus between Linux, Open Source, and RISC-V, but I'm pretty sure BOOM [1] was already running Linux ~2 years ago.

[1] https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-boom

BOOM is built on top of rocket-chip, both going back to 2011-2012 at Berkeley. The rocket-chip devs graduated Berkeley and started SiFive.

SiFive still use, update, and commit back to the rocket-chip code base and have spent resources on verifying the rocket-chip code base and on integrating other industry IP into their branch of rocket-chip to fit their costumers' needs.

Mad props to them. That's impressive and very community-minded.

Where can I buy a board with this?

Not open. Hardware design is closed and only for sale as a netlist.

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